Mailtrace

Everyone hates email marketing spam. Except, as a marketer, I always end up signing up for things because sometimes I get a really solid marketing email that actually makes me log back into a SaaS product or go back to a e-commerce store. And then I go and store that in swipe file so I can copy their methods later.

I hear consumers also use a separate email account for this sort of spam.

Which got me here...

Someone should build a way to reverse engineer and save drip campaigns.

The Idea

MailTrace is my idea for a competitive intelligence tool designed to help email marketers, newsletter operators, and businesses analyze and understand how other companies structure their email marketing campaigns. Also, the distribution idea this time is just so... 🤌 chef's kiss.

Core Purpose:

• Helps users reverse engineer email sequences and drip campaigns from other companies
• Provides insights into how different brands time and structure their email communications
• Enables users to save and organize inspiring email designs

Main Use Cases:

• Study competitor email strategies
• Understand successful email sequence patterns
• Build a library of inspiring email designs
• Analyze timing and structure of email campaigns

Key Features:

1. Onboarding

Onboarding would need to feel frictionless.

Upon setup, users would allow access to their Gmail inbox and Mailtrace should find all the marketing emails, newsletters, and sales outbound and filter it out of my main inbox. I have a quick guide on how to do this for yourself if interested.

Then when I want to sign up for newsletters in the future, I should also have the two following options:

1. Sign up with an email like sean+mailtrace@seanqsun.com.
2. Use a specially designed mailtrace email like alkb9081324n@mailtrace.com

These should then all file into Mailtrace email collections.

2. Email Organization

Email collections would automatically groups incoming emails by sender domain (brand). It would be based off root domains too rather than sender subdomains.

Besides automatically grouping, the platform could let users organize emails into sequences/campaigns (like "Onboarding", "Holiday Campaign", etc.)

You would also have some special collections like an "Unsorted" inbox where new unknown emails can be categorized or "Swipe lists" which I imagine to be Pinterest-style galleries for saving inspiring email designs.

3. Sequence Analysis

1. Shows email sequences in two views:
   1. Inbox View: Traditional email list view
   2. Journey View: Visual flowchart showing how emails connect and the timing between them
2. Visualizes how different types of emails (sales, marketing, etc.) work together
3. Shows delays between emails to understand timing strategies

Distribution

You know what's really cool about running a SaaS that collects really great emails where users are "starring" the best ones they receive for inspiration? The ability to take that sawdust and create your own email inspiration gallery.

Directory sites are all the rage right now and I haven't seen a solid email inspiration one yet.

The other nice thing about inspo galleries is the plethora of recycled social content that comes out of it.

That's it. That's the idea.

Quick note on privacy:
To answer a possible concern about user privacy, the emails would get anonymized before going on a gallery. Or users can elect to share their favorites. Or to avoid directly fishing content out of a user's inbox, Mailtrace could also just sign up to receive the same emails. I think content for this directory should be built manually anyway since taste is a part of this sort of inspiration gallery.

Bonus: Quick & Dirty Onboarding Screen

Largely inspired by leavemealone.app's onboarding